This book examines the mid-Victorian Conservative Party's significant but overlooked role in British foreign policy and in contemporary debate about Britain's relations with Europe. It considers the Conservatives' response—in opposition and government—to the tumultuous era of Napoleon III, the Crimean War and Italian Unification. Within a clear chronological framework, the book focuses on ‘high’ politics, and offers a detailed account of the party's foreign policy in government under its longest-serving but forgotten leader, the fourteenth Earl of Derby. It attaches equal significance to domestic politics, and incorporates an analysis of Disraeli's role in internal tussles over policy, illuminating the roots of the power struggle he would later win against Derby's son in the 1870s. Overall, the book helps provide us with a fuller picture of mid-Victorian Britain's engagement with the world.

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2 Into the Party structure:
the communist children’s movement
We Young Pioneers are gay,
In the day of struggle;
For the foe is up today;
But he’ll be down tomorrow.
Chorus: The way to freedom is our goal,
The struggle is our brother;
The world is like a sailing boat,
And we are at its rudder.1
The task of grooming the communist child extended beyond the confines of the
communist home. From age ten during the 1920s and age nine from the early
1930s, children became eligible to join the communist children’s organisation,
the

1
Introduction
To examine the role of the mid-Victorian Conservative Party in foreign
policy is to leave oneself in splendid isolation. With a very few exceptions, there has been little historiographical interest in the
Conservatives between 1846, when Sir Robert Peel’s administration
collapsed in turmoil over the repeal of the Corn Laws, and 1874, when
Disraeli returned the party to majority government. There has been
even less interest in the Conservatives’ part in the politics of foreign
policy.
The ‘politics of foreign policy’ constitutes a helpful

iniquity, but,
for Conservatives, Whig–Peelite domestic changes were tangled up
with Palmerston’s disruptive foreign policy: the power of the landed
classes was being chipped away at home; the wider European order
was being disturbed overseas. Nevertheless, Conservative unease with
Palmerstonian foreign policy also offered a possible basis for party
reunion. Even after hopes for that reunion had faded, events abroad
enabled domestic opponents to unite, providing parliamentary opportunities for the Conservatives throughout the mid-Victorian period.
In government prior to

4
Refugees and political parties,
1945–50
Introduction
Historians and political scientists have so far devoted little attention
to the refugees’ impact on political life in the Western Occupation
Zones of Germany. This is surprising since the newcomers undoubtedly represented an important factor in post-war West German
politics simply by dint of their numerical strength. They made up
some 16 per cent of the West German electorate at the first Bundestag Election held in August 1949, while in Schleswig-Holstein, the
state most severely affected by the refugee

2
Of all parties and of none: the
League in party politics
There is no Radical amongst us who is not devoted to the great task of preserving the civilisation and peace of the world. There is no Conservative amongst us
who is not standing, who is not working, for a great revolution, a deep-seated
revolution, in the whole relations of one nation to another. (Gilbert Murray,
1930)1
Even now we find it easy to fill halls which would be half empty for any ordinary
party political meeting. (Viscount Cecil, 1936)2
‘On many political issues public opinion is, no doubt

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John Hill and an independent Labour Party
Given the analysis of John Hill’s radicalism in the previous chapter, it
is clearly no longer adequate to characterise every new development in
the early Labour Party as a step towards the public ownership of the
means of production. The new moves were rather, for some time into
the twentieth century, about a traditional liberal outlook negotiating
changing times.
In the first half of 1917 change was in the air but there was little
to suggest the domestic political

5
The Commons and the Parliamentary
Labour Party
Wilkinson’s parliamentary career began as an extension of her trade
unionism. Given her talents for campaigning and her charisma,
NUDAW – and Jagger in particular – pushed for her parliamentary candidacy in Gorton, before she was selected for Ashton in 1922 and then
Middlesbrough East in 1924. As to her view of parliament, she mused
about the Westminster-bound Labour MPs in late 1922: ‘May they not
forget in that luxurious atmosphere the men and women who sent them
there … The revolutionaries have sunk all

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Robert Knight and the origins
of the Labour Party
Long-established misunderstandings of the content and motivation of
Robert Knight’s views in the wider issues of national life have been used
to support the characterisation of battles at the TUC in the early 1890s
in terms of such unhelpful categories as ‘left’ versus ‘right’, and ‘socialism’ versus ‘conservatism’. The implication of a more accurate and
sympathetic reconstruction of Knight’s radical liberalism is that those
battles were rather between two

late 1851,
this was not a terribly accurate assessment of the immediate past, but
to some extent it was true of the years before. After the dramatic
Conservative split over the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, party politics had been dominated by domestic questions. Despite the convulsions of continental revolution in 1848–49, the recurrent themes of
political debate were provided by matters closer to home. A great deal
of political energy was generated by the Russell Government’s continued pursuit of free trade and by periodic bursts of anti-popery. Both